During the installation and commissioning of a networked lighting control system, setup, discovery, address assignment, location identification, and the like, consume significant amounts of time and manual work. For example, in many cases a commissioning agent must identify the various lighting fixtures on a floor plan, and must manually set up a unique address for each lighting fixture or group of lighting fixtures, often by setting DIP switches on each lighting fixture.
During installation, a commissioning agent may use a paper floor plan to mark lighting fixture locations with their respective addresses and may use this information to group the fixtures into their respective control locations. For example, fixtures in a particular room may need to be manually grouped so that they can be controlled as a unit, or an occupancy sensor may need to be manually grouped with the fixtures it controls. This process tends to be very labor intensive and is also prone to mistakes. Moreover, it is time consuming to add additional fixtures to an existing floor plan after the initial commissioning is completed.
Testing and troubleshooting fixtures in a lighting control network is also time consuming often involving a significant amount of manual labor. Commissioning agents often need to identify the fixture(s) in a specific room through building layout documents, then walk to the room and trouble shoot the devices in that room. Adding to the complexity is that the master (central) controllers are often located in electrical closets or behind ceilings, and it is often necessary to connect a user input to the master controller which, in turn, requires accessing and opening the master controller to connect the user input thereto.
It would therefore be desirable to provide an improved networked lighting control system that includes improved systems and methods for identifying and grouping fixtures into the lighting control system to minimize manual inputs, and to reduce or eliminate grouping errors.